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Rasterman On The Impending Release of Enlightenment 17
In development for the better part of the last decade, the 0.17 release of the Enlightenment window manager is slated for November 5th. Leading up to this, the H has an enlightening interview with project lead Rasterman on what to expect. From the article: "Today Enlightenment offers most of what you get from GNOME and KDE, and probably the same if not a bit more than XFCE. It just doesn't try and ship a suite of apps with it. It is the desktop (Window manager, settings, file manager, application launching and management) minus the apps. ... The biggest thing E17 brings to the table is universal compositing. This means you can use a composited desktop without any GPU acceleration at all, and use it nicely. We don't rely on software fallback implementations of OpenGL. We literally have a specific software engine that is so fast that some developers spent weeks using it accidentally, not realizing they had software compositing on their setup."
Awesome. Best Eyecandy desktop. Ever.
Just kidding.
We don't rely on software fallback implementations of OpenGL. We literally have a specific software engine that is so fast that some developers spent weeks using it accidentally, not realizing they had software compositing on their setup."
How is that not a software fallback? Did they mean to say that they wrote their own software fallback?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Similar development cycles, hopefully E17 won't land with the same *thud* as DNF.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Been using e17 for the better part of the last decade. It might not have been released, but CVS head (now SVN head) has usually been completely stable to run.
I hope more folks adopt EFL (Enlightenment foundation libraries) for their projects too. It would be great to just have to re-theme an app to use it on a phone, or a desktop with keyboard as EFL allows you to do.
Again, congrats on coming through with a full featured, fast, lightweight, with all the eye candy you could want, and limitless customization allowing, window manager/desktop.
The architecture behind Enlightenment is really nice. It's fast as hell because it's written like all software should be written. That is, the developers don't assume it's "fast enough" and ignore optimization because it runs well enough on their 16 Ghz machine with a terabyte of RAM.
However, the actual usability of E is bizarre. At first it seems neat because it fast and funky but after using it for a few weeks it starts to give me a headache. It's just too weird, it looks weird, behaves weird, just weirdness all around.
...maybe we can use this to fix the newly broken windows 8 UI? Now that would be a laugh. Funny too how it can be used on mobile devices.
Didn't Enlightenment (and Raster himself) get purged from the GNOME project because the community turned on him because of the poor quality of his code?
the year of Linux on the desktop!
Anyone who wonders if it's going to be a dud, needs to get over to http://www.bodhilinux.com/ immediately to check out a distro that showcases E17 beautifully (it's Ubuntu underneath). I had some issues on a 64bit desktop but it runs wonderfully on my Core Duo netbook, and it's fast.
Likes: gorgeous, responsive desktop, fast, low memory usage, and it's easy to bend it into whatever shape you like. It offers a pretty standard desktop for anybody sick of Unity/Gnome3 but you can also have some radical interfaces too, like a tiling interface that looks like it would work great on a tablet (in fact I wish I had a Linux tablet I could try it on but am scared to nuke my Google Nexus 7 trying it). The "run anything" gizmo - kind of like Alt-F2 - is fantastic; I think it works better than Gnome_Do and Krunner and even Apple's Quicksilver (which is damned good). Their Terminology terminal is pretty sweet; I increasingly spend 90% of my linux day in it.
Dislikes: it takes a bit of getting used to, and the distinction between modules, shelves, modes, and extensions has taken some time to figure out. My version of E7 (Bodhi 2.0.0) also occasionally segfaults, so there must be some remaining bugs to work out.
But this netbook came with Ubuntu/Gnome and I find Bodhi running E17 to be a huge improvement. I love it. If you want to see what E17 is like, what it does, and what it *can* do, there's no better way to start.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Didn't the Wal-Mart gPC run Enlightenment with its gOS? I thought it did. I thought it was a plot by Microsoft to discredit Linux, by shipping something so utterly awful instead of Gnome 2 or KDE. I had Ubuntu, which was usable back then (!), running fine on the gPC, which only fueled my idea that it was some sort of underhanded way to destroy Linux's credibility.
I'm rather amazed that Awesome (http://awesome.naquadah.org/) is the only one with independent desktops for each screen. Doing development on it is, eh, awesome. It even integrates into KDE, though not maybe as perfect as I would have preferred but still, I rather live with some of the minor feature changes it does to KDE, than running KDE. Which is the only one I've ever liked for any amount of time. (Since mid -90's)
If it's not clear, this means I can switch desktop on any one monitor without changing any the desktop on any other monitor. This is vastly more useful than all changing in unison across the monitors. Maybe it's one of those "has to be experienced to be believed" type of things. As a developer after my first switch away from single monitor this is the next biggest improvement/flexibility I've had.
Sometimes I get fed up with all the extra "junk" that is included in any distro. Their urge to change even when it can't readily be improved shows up after hitting the top. Then changes often turn out to be pure sabotage. F.ex. Kmail/Nepomuk/Networkmanager poor implementations, where they got thrown in waay to early to be used safely. At least they should have given us the option. Or something like Zeitgeist which appears that it could easily become a privacy concern.
New E17 Snapshot (76819) Sep 18, 2012 at 03:00 PM
I'm sure there are people out there saying "There's no way two E17 snapshots will ever come out on the same day." My response is as follows:
This time, in addition to featuring the usual improvements of LESS CRASHING and IMPROVEMENTS TO NOT CRASHING, I'm pleased to announce some other changes, though this is not in any way a comprehensive list, and not all the changes were made by me:
LOL
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I have been an e16 user for over 10 years.
The GTK/KDE crapfest, in-fighting, and politics, and stupid new default behavior of the month, can stick-it. They have nothing to offer that I need or want.
I just need X11 with a great virtual window manager. Not an ever-changing interpretation of how to be more like windows, or more like apple, or more like the current project lead's opinion.
I was reading that old link, wow, bless their little hearts, discussing about Windows 98 and Office 2000...
And Slashdot was *still* bitching about whether this was *news* or not... :D
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
O eh, o eh, o eh, o eh
O eh, oo aah, o eh, oo aah
Yah ya goh
O eh, o eh, o eh, o eh
O eh, oo aah, o eh, oo aah
O eh, o eh
Yah ya goh
At night when you turn off all the lights
There's no place that you can hide
Oh no, Rasterman is gonna get'cha
In bed, throw the covers on your head
You pretend like you are dead
But I know it
Rasterman is gonna gey'cha
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get you
Rasterman is gonna get you tonight
No way, you can fight it every day
But no matter what you say
You know it
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
No clue, of what's happening to you
And before this night is through
Ooh baby
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get you
Rasterman is gonna get you tonight
O eh, o eh, o eh, o eh
O eh, oo aah, o eh, oo aah
O eh, o eh, o eh, o eh
O eh, oo aah, o eh, oo aah
O eh, o eh
Yah yeh goh
Yah yeh goh
Yah yeh goh
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get you
Rasterman is gonna get you
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Rasterman is gonna get'cha
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
Rasterman is gonna get you
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
O eh, o eh, o eh, o eh
O eh, oo aah, o eh, oo aah
O eh, o eh, o eh, o eh
O eh, oo aah, o eh, oo aah
O eh, o eh
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na
So 2011 saw Duke Nukem Forever. 2012 sees E 17. Is there a bigger piece of vaporware out there for 2013?
I use Enlightenment on Bodhi Linux for my older machines and it performs wonderfully! It's fast and lean and, once it's all configured, very productive. The community forums are active and helpful, you'll even get a reply from Rasterman himself on occasion. Kudos for keeping this project alive for all those years, it keeps getting better!
Will Enlightenment be moving to Wayland any time soon, or is it hopelessly intertwined with X?
Enlighenment will work with Wayland and will be getting better in the future. Bummer they think they need to extend Wayland itself though.
One day there was a problem with KDE[1] on my computer. Great! I thought, while repairing it I can try out enlightenment. So from the commandline I load E17 and start it up. I get this horrid black and white theme where I can't tell one window from another. I can't find help or run much of anything that way. Well I do manage a commandline IRC client so I go to the channel on freenode and ask for help. Not general help but help- changing the theme so I can get a version of E17 running where I can figure out how to do things. What happened. Well I was using Debian Testing ( LDME to be precise ), in fact I still use Debian testing, and all that happened was that I got grief over using a distro which used old software. BTW the problem with KDE was some corrupt files and I was worried that was because my hard drive had problems, so I needed a decent GUI quickly. At that point I figured that if that was the kind of help I could expect to get when I had a simple question in emergency circumstances, then I would be better off not using it. So I say to the developers you want to act like Microsoft, go write a CUi replacement for Windows 8 instead of linux. [1] What happened is that during a sudden loss of power, a sector on my HD got corrupted. This turned out to contain a part of the kde fontcache. One the file was deleted KDE regenerated the file and worked fine. Then I managed to repair the drive.
Considering that the email insults that rasters manager cced to all of redhat ended up on the net your expectations could have been easily replaced with fact. Broken promises, an idiot manager that didn't last much longer than raster before being fired outright and a better paid offer in his home country filled out the story. What would you do in that situation? I know I would walk and take my project with me.